EIGHT.

THE PALE.

I.

IF historians wish to designate a date to mark the ending of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492 would seem a reasonable choice. In British history, convention has usually selected 1485; for in that year, the long feud now known as the Wars of the Roses between the York and Lancaster branches of the royal Plantagenet house was brought to an end when Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, was killed in battle by Henry Tudor. Under the new Tudor dynasty, England entered the world of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the age of exploration.

But in the western island of Ireland, a better date must surely be just two years later, in the year 1487. For on May 24 of that year, the city of Dublin witnessed an event unique in Ireland's history, and whose long-term repercussions were to be profound: the Irish set out to conquer England. plus The crowd outside Christ Church Cathedral was large. The great men of Ireland were all inside, as were most of the local gentry.

"I wish we could go in, Father," said the red-haired girl. "Weren't we invited?"

"Of course we were. But we got here too late," he replied with a smile. "We'll never get through the crowd now. Besides," he added, "this is better. We shall see the procession as they come out."

Margaret Rivers looked at Christ Church eagerly. Her freckled face was pale with excitement, her blue eyes shining. She knew her family was important. She wasn't sure exactly why, but she knew it must be true, because her father had told her. "And you, Margaret, are going to be a great success," he would tell her.

"How do you know, Father?" she would ask him.

"Because you're my special girl," he'd reply, as she knew he was going to, and she would feel a little rush of happiness. She had three brothers, but she was the only girl, and she was the youngest. Of course she was his special girl. She wasn't quite sure what she had to do to be a great success, but earlier that year, on her eighth birthday, her father had announced to the whole family: "Margaret will make a brilliant marriage. To a man of wealth and importance." So she had supposed that success must be something to do with this.

She knew her father was a wonderful man. Sometimes she had seen her mother cast her eyes up to heaven when he was speaking; she didn't know quite what it meant, since her mother never said; but then her mother was subject, sometimes, to strange moods.

The nuns always treated her father with the greatest respect when he visited the old convent. There were only seven of them, and one of these was deaf, but it seemed their lives were entirely in his hands. "Where would we be without you?" they used to say. Her father looked after all their affairs, managed their extensive lands, and advised them so that they never had to worry that their abbey's large endowments would fail to support their few and modest needs. "We know we can always trust your dear father," one of the faithful nuns remarked to little Margaret one day.

"Your father is a gentleman."

A gentleman. Their house in the suburb of Oxmantown might be no different from those of the local merchants, but all over Fingal and beyond, Margaret knew, the landowners were, in one way or another, her kinsfolk. "We are related," her father liked to say, "to every family of consequence in the Pale."

The Pale: that was what they called the counties around Dublin now-a name that suggested an invisible palisade enclosing the region. Conditions there were pretty much as they had been the century before. Within the Pale, as in England, lay a pattern of parishes and counties, where sheriffs collected royal taxes and the justices decided cases by English common law. Around the edge of the Pale, the Marcher lords still led their frontier existence; and beyond the Pale, whether ruled over by Irish chiefs or the great magnates like the Butlers and Fitzgeralds, lay the world of Gaelic Ireland. Beyond the Pale, as far as Margaret's father was concerned, civilization ended. But within the Pale, order was assured by the English in Ireland, the Irish of English blood, men like himself: not, perhaps, all that he might have liked to be, but in his own eyes at least and those of the nuns, an English gentleman.

Yet today, in Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral, gentlemen like himself were preparing to invade the English kingdom.

"Look, Father." The cathedral doors were swinging open. Menatarms were coming out, pushing back the crowd.

A broad pathway was being cleared. Figures were appearing, in glittering robes, in the doorway.

Her father lifted her up and Margaret could see them clearly: three bishops with mitres on their heads led the procession; then came the abbots and priors.

Next, in their robes of office, red and blue and gold, came the mayor and the aldermen of the city; behind them walked the Archbishop of Dublin with the Lord Deputy, the Earl of Kildare, head of the mighty Fitzgerald clan and the most powerful man in all Ireland. Next came the Lord Chancellor, and the Treasurer, followed by the major officeholders and nobility. And then came the boy.

He was only a little fellow, hardly older than herself. For a crown, they had taken a circlet of gold, which had formed the halo over a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and placed it upon his head. And to make sure that this new boy king should be clearly seen, they had selected a gentleman from Fingal, one Darcy by name, a giant of a man who stood six and a half feet tall, and put the boy king to ride upon his shoulders.

Bringing up the rear of the procession came two hundred German mercenary landknechts, sent from the Low Countries by the Duchess of Burgundy, carrying fearsome pikes and accompanied by fife and drum.

For the boy, Edmund, Earl of Warwick, had just been crowned King of England, and was about to set forth to claim his rightful kingdom. But how had it come to pass that he should be crowned in Dublin?

A generation ago, during a period when the royal house of York was in the ascendant over that of Lancaster, one of the princes of York had governed Ireland for a number of years and, uncommon for an Englishman, had made himself popular. Ever since, in many parts of the Irish community, and especially in Dublin, there had been a loyalty towards the Yorkist cause. But now the House of York had been defeated. Henry Tudor, who held the crown by right of conquest, had based his claim to royalty on the fact that his forebears, though only an upstart gentry family from Wales, had married into the House of Lancaster. As royalty goes, this was quite a shaky claim; and although the new Tudor king cleverly married a Yorkist princess to strengthen his royal position, he could not really sleep easy if there were other, more legitimate Plantagenet heirs still at large.

And suddenly, some months ago, an heir had appeared, with a far more legitimate claim to the throne than Henry Tudor. He was Edmund, Earl of Warwick, a royal prince of the house of York.

His appearance under the care of a priest had caused consternation at the Tudor court. King Henry had immediately called him an impostor. "His real name is Lambert Simnel," he declared, the son of an organ maker in Oxford-though the craftsman in question was conveniently dead. Then Henry produced another boy, whom he kept in the Tower of London, and announced that he was the real Edmund of Warwick.

The trouble was that two of Edmund's Plantagenet relations-one of them was the Duchess of Burgundy, a Yorkist princess-having interviewed the two boys, both declared that the priest's boy was indeed Edmund, and that Henry's boy was a fake. For the boy's own safety, the priest had brought him across to Ireland. And today he was being crowned.

Yet however much they preferred the House of York, why would the great men of the English community of Ireland choose to defy the Tudor king? Seen from a later century it may seem strange, yet in the year 1487, after decades of power shifting back and forth between York and Lancaster, there was no particular reason to suppose that the only half-royal Henry Tudor would be able to keep his crown. If many of the great nobles believed they would be better off under a Yorkist prince than a Lancastrian conqueror, the bishops, abbots, and royal officials would hardly have crowned the boy if they weren't honestly convinced that he was, indeed, the rightful heir.

The procession had just started down the street when Margaret and her father were joined by a young man to whom her father remarked pleasantly, "Well, John, have you decided?"

Her eldest brother, John. Like Margaret, he had inherited red hair from their mother's family, for she had been a Harold. But where Margaret's was dark, almost auburn, John's was light and rose like a carrot-coloured flame from his head. Twenty years old, tall, athletic, to Margaret he had always been a hero. And never more so than today. For the last week he and his father had been discussing whether he should join the coming expedition. Now he announced: "I have, Father. I'm going with them."

"Very well." Her father nodded. "I've been talking to a man who knows Thomas Fitzgerald. That's the brother of Kildare himself, you know," he explained to Margaret. "We'll not have you going as a common foot soldier. I should hope that my son," he added rather grandly, "would be shown some consideration."

"Thank you, Father." Her brother smiled affectionately. He had a beautiful smile.

"You are going to England?" Margaret asked him excitedly. "To fight for the boy?"

He nodded.

"You're right to go, John," her father said. "Do well, and there could be rewards."

"Let's follow the procession," her brother cried, and scooping Margaret up, he placed her on his shoulders and started to stride along the street with his father walking in a dignified manner beside him. And how happy and proud Margaret felt, to be riding on her brother's shoulders, just like the boy king ahead of them, on that sunny morning in May.

They went down the street between the high-gabled houses, with the fifes and drums sounding cheerfully in front; out through the eastern gateway known as Dame's Gate, and across to Hoggen Green and the ancient Thingmount.

Having made the circuit of that, the procession, still followed by a large crowd, made its way back to the city before finally disappearing through the gateway into Dublin Castle where there was to be a banquet given in the boy king's honour.

"Are you going to the banquet, Father," Margaret asked, as her brother put her down.

"No," he replied, then smiled confidently. "But many of the great lords in there would be your kinsmen. Always remember this day, Margaret," he went on firmly, "for it will go down in history. Remember you were here, with your brave brother and your father."

It was not only her father who was so confident. Within days, the Parliament of Ireland had met and the English gentlemen and Church representatives had enthusiastically ratified the crowning. They had issued a proclamation of his kingship. They had even caused new coins-groats and half-groats-to be struck with the boy's head depicted on them. As well as the German landknechts, Thomas Fitzgerald had collected Irish mercenaries and young enthusiasts like John so that before the end of May he could tell his brother, Lord Kildare, "We're ready to go. And we should strike at once." Indeed, only one discordant note was sounded in those heady days.

It might have been expected. If the two mighty earldoms of the Fitzgerald clan-Kildare stretching out from the centre of the Pale, and Desmond to the south-were the most powerful lordships in the land, the third great lordship, the Butler family's earldom of Ormond, was still an impressive power to be reckoned with. Sometimes the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds were on good terms, but more often they were not; and it was hardly surprising if the Butlers were jealous of the Fitzgerald domination. So when Henry Tudor had taken the throne from the House of York, to which the Fitzgeralds were known to be so friendly, the Butlers had been quick to let Henry know that they were glad to support his Lancastrian cause.

And now, just after the Parliament in Dublin had declared for him, a messenger came from the Earl of Ormond, the head of the Butlers. "Lord Ormond refuses to do homage to this boy pretender," he announced, "and declares all these proceedings to be illegal."

The Fitzgerald reaction was swift. Lord Kildare had the messenger taken straight down to the Thingmount on Hoggen Green, and hanged.

"That is harsh," Margaret's father declared with a shake of his head. "He was only the messenger." But Margaret could hear the tone of sneaking admiration in his voice. Two days after that, Kildare's brother Thomas and his little army set sail for England, taking her brother John with them.

The boy king's expedition landed in England on the fourth day of June. Making their way towards York, they were joined by some of the Yorkist lords and their retinues; soon their numbers had swelled to six and a half thousand men. Then they turned south.

And Henry Tudor, caught by surprise, might even have lost his kingdom if several of the English magnates, who owed him loyalty and who reckoned that he offered the best chance of order, hadn't rallied to him at once with unexpectedly large contingents of troops. On the morning of June 16, near a village called East Stoke in the Midlands, the boy king's army found itself confronted by fifteen thousand well-equipped and trained fighting men. Though the Germans had deadly crossbows, Henry Tudor's Welsh and English longbowmen could loose continuous volleys of arrows that fell like a hailstorm. Against the half-trained and mostly unarmoured contingents from Ireland, Henry had trained pikemen and armoured knights.

The Irish army was smashed. The boy king was captured; and having secured him, Henry Tudor gave no quarter. At the place where they fought, there was a ditch which from that day onwards was to be known as Red Gutter since, it was said, by the end of the morning it was filled with blood. For they hacked the Germans and Irish to pieces, almost every one.

Fortunately, Margaret only ever knew that her brother had been slain.

But Henry Tudor was more than ruthless; he was also clever. Having got the boy Edmund alive, he did not kill him or even put him in prison. Still insisting that he was only an impostor called Lambert Simnel, he set him to work in the royal kitchens from which he would cheerfully summon him sometimes to serve the guests at feasts. During Henry's reign, and for centuries to come, hardly anybody believed the boy to be the royal prince that, quite possibly, he really was.

Yet the lessons which Margaret learned from these events had little to do with the boy king himself.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, she knew only a numbing sense of grief. And though she had been brought up proud that she was English, the unconscious thought formed in her mind that England itself was somehow an alien and threatening place. How was it, she asked herself, if there was a God in heaven, that the English king could take her brother from her like this? But as she grew older and pondered the events that had led to his death, a new and more perceptive question occurred to her.

"How was it, Father, that John was killed, but that the Fitzgeralds were not punished?" It was a question that went to the root of Ireland's political situation.

For when the boy king was crowned in Dublin, it was Kildare himself, head of the Fitzgeralds and, as Lord Deputy, King Henry Tudors own representative and governor on the island, who had led the treasonable business. The Butlers, on the other hand, had stayed loyal. Yet Henry had forgiven Kildare, while the Butlers had received no great reward for their pains.

"The Fitzgeralds have the most territory. They're intermarried with so many gentry families, andwiththe greatest Irish princes as well, that they can call on more men and more favours than any other clan," her father told her. "Moreover," he explained, "though the Butlers' power is huge as well, their territory lies between the two Fitzgerald earldoms-Kildare on their northern flank and Desmond in the south. If the Fitzgeralds want to, they can squeeze the Butlers," he made a gesture with his two hands, "like a pincer. So you see, Margaret, of the two great English lordships, Fitzgerald is the natural one to govern. And if the English king tries to ignore them both and send his own man to govern, they would soon make life so difficult for him that he gives up."

And during the rest of her childhood, this was exactly the political pattern that Margaret was to see.

Even when Henry sent over his trusted deputy Poynings-who bluntly told the Irish Parliament they could no longer pass any laws without the Tudor king's approval, and even arrested Kildare, who was sent to London-the Fitzgeralds made it so difficult for him to govern that before long even Poynings gave up. And back in England, when he was told, "All Ireland cannot govern Kildare and his Fitzgeralds," Henry Tudor, that supreme realist, calmly observed, "If all Ireland cannot govern Kildare, then Kildare had better govern Ireland," and sent the head of the Fitzgeralds back as his Lord Deputy again.

"It's Kildare who rules in Ireland, Margaret," her father told her, "and always will be."

Margaret was thirteen when she learned that her father had been cheated. It happened quite by chance.

It had promised to be an uneventful morning at Oxmantown. Her father had been at the house with no particular business to do that day, when a neighbour had come by to ask if he was going across the river to watch the fun. "Did you not hear," he explained, "that a group of Butler's and Fitzgerald's men are having a fight over by Saint Patrick's?"

"What about?" her father asked.

"Who knows? Because they're Butlers and Fitzgeralds."

"I suppose I may as well," said her father. And he certainly would have gone without Margaret if she had not begged him to let her come. "If there's any danger," he told her firmly, "you'll have to go straight home."

When they got to Saint Patrick's, they found a crowd gathered outside. They seemed in a cheerful mood, and their neighbour, who went ahead to find out what was happening, soon reported that the fight was now over and the rival groups, both in the cathedral, had agreed to a truce.

"There's only one problem," he explained. "The Butler men are on one side of a big door and the Fitzgerald men on the other; but the door is locked and no one has the key. And until they've shaken hands neither side intends to move from the place where they are, on account of their mistrust."

"Do they mean to stay there forever, then?" asked her father.

"Not at all. They will cut a hole in the door.

But it's a mighty door, so it will take some time."

It was just then that Margaret saw the little girl.

She was standing with her mother, not far off. She might be five years old, Margaret guessed, but she was tiny. She was dressed in a bright patterned dress; her eyes were dark, her olive-coloured features finely drawn and delicate. She was the neatest little person that Margaret had ever seen. One glance at her mother, a small, elegant Mediterranean woman, explained the child's looks at once. She must be Spanish.

"Oh, Father," she cried, "can I go and play with her?"

It was unusual but not unexpected to encounter Spanish features in Ireland. The Black Irish, people often called them. Notwithstanding the legend that some of the island's earliest inhabitants had come from the Iberian peninsula, the reason for the Black Irish was very simple. Centuries of trade between Spain and the Irish ports had probably resulted in a few intermarriages, but the greatest sources of the Black Irish were the regular visits of the great Spanish fishing fleets which for generations had come for the rich catch off the island's southern coast, especially off the lands of the O'Sullivans and the O'Driscolls down in West Cork. Ships from these fleets would often put into the creeks to process their catch with salt, paying the O'Sullivan and O'Driscoll lords a levy for the privilege.

Sometimes a sailor would find a local sweetheart and settle there, or leave a child.

The mother had no objection to Margaret amusing her tiny daughter. Her name was Joan. For some time Margaret played with the doll-like child who was obviously fascinated by the older, red- haired girl and never took her large, brown eyes off her. Finally, however, her father called Margaret back and told her that it was time to be going. And he had just smiled in a friendly way at the Spanish woman and her daughter, and started to turn away, when a cheer from the crowd announced that the men from the cathedral were coming out, and so they stayed to watch.

The Fitzgerald men came first, about a score of them. They moved off swiftly towards the city gate. A few moments later, the Butler group emerged. Most of them started to leave in the direction of Saint Stephen's hospital; but a few split away, and one of these came through the crowd towards them.

He was a handsome, well-set man with thinning brown hair and a broad, English- looking face. As he came out of the throng, the little Spanish girl caught sight of him, cried out, "Papa!" and in an instant had thrown herself into his arms. Margaret smiled. It was a charming scene. So she was surprised when she glanced at her father to see him scowling with fury.

"We're going," Rivers said suddenly, and taking her by the arm, he almost dragged her away.

"What has happened?" she asked. "Is it Joan's father?"

"I never guessed she was his child," he muttered.

"Who is he, Father?"

"Henry Butler," he said, but the anger in his voice warned her not to ask him any more.

They had reached the bridge across the river before he broke his silence.

"Many years ago, Margaret, there was an inheritance-not huge, but large enough-that fell between two cousins of my mother's family. My mother was cheated of her rightful share. With the connivance of Ormond, it all went to the mother of that man you saw back there. His name is Henry Butler. He's from a junior branch of the Butlers, but still a distant kinsman of the earl.

And he has been living on the fruits of that fine estate which should have been mine. So it hurts me and angers me to see him." He paused. "I never told you this before because I don't like to speak of it."

A disputed inheritance: Margaret had often heard of such things.

Disputes between heiresses, in particular, were common enough in Ireland.

"Does Henry Butler know he has your inheritance?"

"Most certainly he does," her father replied.

"I met the man once. As soon as he heard my name, he turned his back and walked away."

"Joan is sweet," Margaret said. It made her sad that the pretty little child should be the daughter of her father's enemy.

"She has your money," he answered grimly.

They did not speak about it anymore, but that night, when her mother supposed she was asleep, Margaret heard her parents talking.

"It was so long ago," she heard her mother pleading, in a low voice. "Do not think of it."

"But that is why I am forced to live like this, a miserable agent working for others, instead of a gentleman on my own estate."

"We manage well enough. Can you not be happy with what you have? A wife and children who love you?"

"You know I love my family more than anything in the world." His voice descended so that she could not hear it, then rose again. "But how can I provide for them?

Henry Butler has it all. Where is Margaret's dowry, tell me? The little Spanish girl has it." There was a pause. Then her father's voice again, almost in tears. "Oh the pain of it. The pain."